


Genius

by pega



Series: Genius [1]
Category: Arrested Development
Genre: Drabble, F/M, I have a lot of feelings about Lucille okay, prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-17
Updated: 2018-06-17
Packaged: 2019-05-24 11:08:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14953529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pega/pseuds/pega
Summary: Lucy Jenkins is eight when she realizes she will never be considered a genius.Geniuses, her teacher explains, are men with funny hair and big degrees in physics. They work in science labs and have flashes of insight and are very, very lonely.





	Genius

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [ADS5Prompts](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/ADS5Prompts) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
>  
> 
> I want the early days of Lucille Bluth. Childhood, teenage years, time in the USO, her relationships with George Sr. and Oscar - just gimme that sweet sweet backstory content.

Lucy Jenkins is eight when she realizes she will never be considered a genius.

 

Geniuses, her teacher explains, are men with funny hair and big degrees in physics. They work in science labs and have flashes of insight and are very, very lonely.

 

Lucy taught herself to read when she was three and a half, taught herself to write at four, and started playing with numbers as soon as she realized that numbers mean power. She learns to calculate tax in her head, to smile sweetly at store clerks while offering almost the right amount of money and to pocket the change whenever her mother sends her to buy bread or milk from the grocery store. Lucy hides her skimmed off the top change in a mason jar beneath her bed. She isn’t sure what she’s saving for yet, but she knows she’ll need the money someday to get the hell out of Arizona.

 

Arizona is dry and dusty and her father wears ugly suits to work in an office selling paper. Her mother tries to keep the house clean, but the dust creeps back in anyway, no matter what she does. There are stacks of Better Homes and Gardens magazine everywhere, and no matter how hard Lucy wishes for them to turn into piles of books, they never do. She reads them anyway, soaking up words like “exquisite” and “sublime” and “chateau”.

 

When her teacher tells the class about geniuses, shows a photo of a man with frizzy hair and grins at the boys, Lucy decides then and there that her next project will be learning how to play dumb. If the world isn’t going to look at her and see her, really see her, she isn’t going to pass up that chance to get things done her way, invisibly.

 

Lucy learns about flirting the same way she learns about everything else. She watches, with unblinking eyes that her father calls sweet and her mother calls disconcerting. Lucy notices that her older sister has two boyfriends, one she smiles at with her mouth and one she smiles at with her eyes. When Lucy is ten, her sister marries the mouth smiling boy, and the ceremony is big and beautiful and expensive. There’s a lesson in there that Lucy doesn’t understand until she’s smiling with her mouth at one twin and smiling with her eyes at another, but Lucy remembers her sister and her boys.

 

Lucy remembers everything.

 

She remembers that her father’s book club is supposed to meet on Thursday nights, not Friday nights. She remembers what her mother’s perfume smells like, and she notices when her father starts smelling like something else. She remembers every time her father said I love you to her mother between 1959 and 1968, up until the nice policeman with badge 3662 knocked on their door with the bad news (it was 41 times in seven years, and Lucy thinks that if that’s what love is, it’s not enough for her, could never be enough for her, not with her brain spinning fast like this all the time).

 

As soon as Lucy is eighteen, she joins the United Service Organization. She tells the coordinator that she can sing, and they ship her off to Vietnam without even asking her to show them first.

 

Lucy has never been good at making friends. What she finds funny, other people find mean, but she thinks privately that mean is better than strange, which is what her first attempts at humor came off as, poorly done and oddly timed. Being mean is much better than being odd. If you’re mean, she reasons, people will be drawn in with sick curiosity, eager to hear what you’ll say about their enemies and their friends. If you’re odd, you’re the subject of that curiosity, someone to pick apart under a microscope. Lucy would rather do the dissection.

 

She quickly gets a reputation for making the other girls (and generals, sometimes) cry. It gets her a private room and a throng of followers.

 

When Lucy is performing in the rain and gloom of her usual Tuesday afternoon show, she spots a man in the back row with a grin and profile like he’s been carved by the gods. He finds her after the show, puts his hands on her hips before she has the chance to say hello, and pulls her into a slow waltz without music.

 

When he asks her what her name is, she says Lucille. He scrunches up his nose and asks if he could call her Lucy instead, and that is the moment she falls in love.

 

She’ll train him out of the habit eventually, after an affair that lasts decades and the birth of an illicit child, but Oscar Bluth will be the only person to call her Lucy Jenkins after her mother dies, and the last person alive who knows that once was the only name she had.

 

After her stint in the U.S.O. ends, Lucille follows Oscar Bluth back to Los Angeles. It’s a big city, dirtier than she thought it would be, but Lucille knows how to survive. She keeps a mason jar of tips under her bed, dips into that fund occasionally to buy herself underwear with lace, and she waits. On weekends, she reads the Los Angeles Times business section first, then the real estate section.

 

Back in Arizona, her family always rented. Here in Los Angeles, she hears rumblings about limited space and a rush of people from colder climates seeking the sun, seeking stars, seeking something special and she starts jotting down floorplans in a legal pad she shoplifted from the convenience store.

 

One day, Oscar brings his brother to her evening shift at Stucky's. George Bluth is dressed in a shirt that Lucille knows costs three hundred dollars at Barneys, and when she leans in close to show of well-maintain cleavage, she notices that he’s carrying a copy of the Los Angeles Times real estate section rolled up in his jacket pocket. She remembers (because Lucille remembers everything, she has to) that Oscar once joked that his brother is more shark than man, more machine than man, a born salesman with a bigger sense of style than of numbers.

 

Before the meal is over, Lucille has George Bluth’s hotel room number and a time for them to meet.

 

She ignores the hurt look in Oscar’s eyes. Good hair isn’t enough, and love certainly isn’t enough in this world.

 

Sex with George is fine. He enjoys the lace underwear, and she enjoys hiding her diaphragm in the hotel trashcan before they start. He calls her beautiful, calls her sexy, calls her hot, and Lucille realizes while she’s writhing on top of him that it’s safer this way, if he never realizes that calling her brilliant is the one thing that could truly send her to pieces like she’s pretending to.

 

Her mother calls, collect, and asks when “Lucy” is coming home. Lucille rubs her raised stomach and says someday when she really means never.

 

George kisses her stomach at night and whispers hopes for his son against her skin. “You’ll be a genius, boy, with my genes.”

 

“A genius,” Lucille whispers. “How wonderful.”


End file.
